Folks born after the era of atmospheric nuclear testing,
and acquainted with it only through accounts written
decades later, are prone to react with bafflement—“What
were they thinking?” This comprehensive, meticulously
researched, and thoroughly documented account of the epoch not only describes
what happened and what the consequences were for those in the
path of fallout, but also places events in the social, political,
military, and even popular culture context of that very different
age. A common perception about the period is “nobody
really understood the risks”. Well, it's quite a bit more
complicated than that, as you'll understand after reading this
exposition. As early as 1953, when ranchers near Cedar City,
Utah lost more than 4000 sheep and lambs after they grazed on
grass contaminated by fallout, investigators discovered the
consequences of ingestion of Iodine-131, which is concentrated
by the body in the thyroid gland, where it can not only lead to
thyroid cancer but faster-developing metabolic diseases. The
AEC reacted immediately to this discovery. Commissioner Eugene
Zuckert observed that “In the present frame of mind of the
public, it would only take a single illogical and unforeseeable
incident to preclude holding any future tests in the United
States”, and hence the author of the report on the incident was
ordered to revise the document, “eliminating any reference
to radiation damage or effects”. In a subsequent meetings
with the farmers, the AEC denied any connection between fallout
and the death of the sheep and denied compensation, claiming
that the sheep, including grotesquely malformed lambs born to
irradiated ewes, had died of “malnutrition”.

It was obvious to others that something serious was happening.
Shortly after bomb tests began in Nevada, the Eastman Kodak plant
in Rochester, New York which manufactured X-ray film discovered
that when a fallout cloud was passing overhead their film batches
would be ruined by pinhole fogging due to fallout radiation, and
that they could not even package the film in cardboard supplied
by a mill whose air and water supplies were contaminated by
fallout. Since it was already known that radiologists with
occupational exposure to X-rays had mean lifespans several years shorter
than the general public, it was pretty obvious that exposing much of
the population of a continent (and to a lesser extent the entire
world) to a radiation dose which could ruin X-ray film had to be
problematic at best and recklessly negligent at worst. And yet the
tests continued, both in Nevada and the Pacific, until the Limited
Test Ban Treaty between the U.S., USSR, and Great Britain was
adopted in 1963. France and China, not signatories
to the treaty, continued atmospheric tests until 1971 and 1980
respectively.

What were they thinking? Well, this was a world
in which the memory of a cataclysmic war which had killed
tens of millions of people was fresh, which appeared to
be on the brink of an even more
catastrophic conflict, which might be triggered if the
adversary developed a weapon believed to permit a decisive
preemptive attack or victory through intimidation. In such
an environment where everything might be lost through weakness
and dilatory progress in weapons research, the prospect of
an elevated rate of disease among the general population was
weighed against the possibility of tens of millions of deaths
in a general conflict and the decision was made to pursue the
testing. This may very well have been the correct
decision—since you can't test a counterfactual, we'll
never know—but there wasn't a general war between
the East and West, and to this date no nuclear weapon has been
used in war since 1945. But what is shocking and reprehensible
is that the élites who made this difficult judgement call
did not have the courage to share the facts with the constituents
and taxpayers who paid their salaries and bought the bombs that
irradiated their children's thyroids with Iodine-131 and
bones with Strontium-90. (I'm a boomer. If you want to
know just how many big boom clouds a boomer lived through
as a kid, hold a sensitive radiation meter up to one of
the long bones of the leg; you'll see the elevated beta
radiation from the Strontium-90 ingested in milk and immured
in the bones [Strontium is a chemical analogue of Calcium].)
Instead, they denied the obvious effects, suppressed research
which showed the potential risks, intimidated investigators
exploring the effects of low level radiation, and covered up
assessments of fallout intensity and effects upon those exposed.
Thank goodness such travesties of science and public policy
could not happen in our enlightened age! An excellent example
of mid-fifties AEC propaganda is the
Atomic
Test Effects in the Nevada Test Site Region
pamphlet, available on this site:
“Your best action is not to be worried
about fall-out. … We can expect many
reports that ‘Geiger counters were going
crazy here today.’ Reports like this may
worry people unnecessarily. Don't let them bother you.”

This book describes U.S. nuclear testing in Nevada in detail,
even giving the precise path the fallout cloud from most
detonations took over the country. Pacific detonations are
covered in less detail, concentrating on major events and
fallout disasters such as
Castle Bravo.
Soviet tests and the
Chelyabinsk-40
disaster are covered more sketchily (fair enough—most details
remained secret when the book was written), and British, French, and
Chinese atmospheric tests are mentioned only in passing.

The paperback edition of this book has the hefty cover price of
US$39.95, which is ta lot for a book of 548 pages with just a few
black and white illustrations. I read the Kindle edition, which
is priced at US$11.99 at this writing, which is, on its merits,
even more overpriced. It is a sad, sorry, and shoddy piece of
work, which appears to be the result of scanning a printed
edition of the book with an optical character recognition
program and transferring it to Kindle format without any
proofreading whatsoever. Numbers and punctuation are uniformly
garbled, words are mis-recognised, random words are jammed into
the text as huge raster images, page numbers and chapter
headings are interleaved into the text, and hyphenated words are
not joined while pairs of unrelated words are run together. The
abundant end note citations are randomly garbled and not linked
to the notes at the end of the book. The index is just a scan
of that in the printed book, garbled, unlinked to the text, and
utterly useless. Most public domain Kindle books sold for a
dollar have much better production values than this full price
edition. It is a shame that such an excellent work on which the
author invested such a great amount of work doing the research
and telling the story has been betrayed by this slapdash Kindle
edition which will leave unwary purchasers feeling their pockets
have been picked. I applaud Amazon's providing a way for niche
publishers and independent authors to bring their works to market
on the Kindle, but I wonder if their lack of quality control on
the works published (especially at what passes for full price on
the Kindle) might, in the end, injure the reputation of Kindle books
among the customer base. After this experience, I know for sure that
I will never again purchase a Kindle book from a minor publisher
before checking the comments to see if the transfer merits the
asking price. Amazon might also consider providing a feedback
mechanism for Kindle purchasers to rate the quality of the transfer
to the Kindle, which would appear along with the content-based
rating of the work.